Generating political commitment for ending malnutrition in all its forms: A system dynamics approach for strengthening nutrition actor networks.

Generating political commitment for ending all forms of malnutrition represents a key challenge for the global nutrition community. Without commitment, the policies, programs, and resources needed to improve nutrition are unlikely to be adopted, effectively implemented, nor sustained. One essential driver of commitment is nutrition actor network (NAN) effectiveness, the web of individuals and organizations operating within a given country who share a common interest in improving nutrition and who act collectively to do so. To inform new thinking and action towards strengthening NAN effectiveness, we use a systems dynamics theoretical approach and literature review to build initial causal loop diagrams (CLDs) of political commitment and NAN effectiveness and a qualitative group model building (GMB) method involving an expert workshop to strengthen model validity. First, a "nutrition commitment system" CLD demonstrates how five interrelated forms of commitment-rhetorical, institutional, operational, embedded, and system-wide-can dynamically reinforce or diminish one another over time. Second, we present CLDs demonstrating factors shaping NAN effectiveness organized into three categories: actor features, resources, and capacities; framing strategies, evidence, and norms; and institutional, political, and societal contexts. Together, these models generate hypotheses on how political commitment and NAN effectiveness could be strengthened in future and may provide potential starting points for country-specific conversations for doing so

Improving Maternal Health in Pakistan: Toward a Deeper Understanding of the Social Determinants of Poor Women’s Access to Maternal Health Services.

Evidence suggests national- and community-level interventions are not reaching women living at the economic and social margins of society in Pakistan. We conducted a 10-month qualitative study (May 2010–February 2011) in a village in Punjab, Pakistan. Data were collected using 94 in-depth interviews, 11 focus group discussions, 134 observational sessions, and 5 maternal death case studies. Despite awareness of birth complications and treatment options, poverty and dependence on richer, higher-caste people for cash transfers or loans prevented women from accessing required care. There is a need to end the invisibility of low-caste groups in Pakistani health care policy. Technical improvements in maternal health care services should be supported to counter social and economic marginalization so progress can be made toward Millennium Development Goal 5 in Pakistan

How do\ua0informal institutions influence inward FDI? A\ua0systematic review

In the last 15\ua0years, the literature on international economics and international business has been paying increasing attention to informal institutions and to how they affect a variety of economic variables, inward FDI in particular. The main aims of this work are: to shed more light on a puzzling, elusive concept -informal institutions- also by drawing comparisons with related constructs; to overview the main types of informal institution and their effects on FDI inflows; to conduct a meta-analysis to explore the heterogeneity across empirical studies focusing on the effects of informal institutions on FDI inflows. The main findings of the present work are as follows: according to most of the existing literature, informal institutions, such as trust, social networks and corruption, matter for the purpose of attracting FDI. The sign is significantly determined by the type of informal institution considered. In particular, social networks and factors typically facilitating or in favour of FDI\u2014such as trust and a positive attitude to liberalism\u2014have a significant and positive impact on inward FDI, and this especially holds when the host country is a developing economy